Dynastic History|Wat Phra Si Sanphet — The Monastery in the Palace That Had No Monks

In 1448 Borommatrailokkanat moved the royal palace a few hundred metres north and turned the ground it had occupied since the city's founding into a monastery. It was a monastery in name and plan only. No monastic community lived in it. The compound served the palace beside it and was used by the royal family — a different institution from a wat that takes alms from a street.

Three chedis stand in a line down the centre of the site. They hold the ashes of Borommatrailokkanat and of two of his sons who also reigned, raised in stages across the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A father and the two kings who followed him were kept inside the palace precinct rather than in a public temple, and the arrangement of a burial line inside a royal enclosure is itself a statement about who was entitled to rule.

In 1767 the Burmese army took Ayutthaya and burned it, the inhabitants left, and the capital was never rebuilt on this ground. What stands now is the work of the twentieth century as much as the fifteenth: the ruins are managed as a historical park by the Fine Arts Department under the antiquities act of 1961, and UNESCO inscribed 289 hectares of the city in 1991 under the criterion of bearing witness to the development of Thai national art.

The three chedis are the image by which Ayutthaya is generally known. The palace they were built to serve is a low outline of brick foundations immediately to the north of them.

📸 Cover: The three chedis of Wat Phra Si Sanphet, Supanut Arunoprayote, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons